GNU bug report logs - #10317
patch to su: -l and -p should not be used together

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Message #14 received at 10317 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Rocky Bernstein <rocky <at> gnu.org>
To: Jim Meyering <jim <at> meyering.net>
Cc: 10317 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#10317: PING - bug#10317: patch to su: -l and -p should not be
	used together
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:29:03 -0500

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On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 4:19 AM, Jim Meyering <jim <at> meyering.net> wrote:

> Rocky Bernstein wrote:
> > It's been a couple of months since I first sent this was sent without
> nary
> > an ack. Comments?
>
> Hi Rocky,
>
> su is barely on life support in coreutils.
> Meaning that it's no longer really maintained.
> We stopped installing it (by default) back in the 2007-2008
> time frame (6.9.90, 7.0).  We nearly removed it altogether.
>
> Do you build/install coreutils yourself, or use it via a distribution?
> If the latter, which distribution?
>

CenOS 6.2 which seems to use coreutils 8.4

>
> I don't remember looking carefully at your patch before,
> but glanced through it just now.  Here are some suggestions
> if you'd like to pursue it:
>
>  - use "error (0, 0, ...", not fprintf (
>  - indent with spaces, not TABs
>  - use gnu indentation/formatting style (esp. wrt braces)
>  - mention the change in NEWS
>  - for a behavior change like this, we would like a test case
>

The above seems all reasonable and easily doable. But are you suggesting is
even after getting this into the next coreutils, no OS is likely to use it?

The basic idea is that a colleague and I were confused by the fact that -l
and -p conflict although this was not apparent in the documentation. I
wound up downloading the source code to understand fully.

So something even as simple as mentioning this in doc/coreutils.texi would
have been helpful (which is the first part of that patch).

Going further I realized that it is probably erroneous to supply both -l -p
and that can be easily warned.

But if there is a better place such to report such problems or get code
improved, let me know! Thanks.

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